And that almost answered his next question, but he still had to ask it. “What happened to the owners, Grandmother?” She’d never named them. She’d carefully avoided naming them.
“They do not exist. Their cities do not exist. Their language, history, and culture do not exist, and their name has been wiped from the history of all beings everywhere, save for those whispers lingering in the myths of the sidhe.” She lifted the teapot, poured, and held out a cup. “More tea?”
He accepted it but did not drink, his mind tumbling with implications. The most adamantly sovereign race in existence had been born in the most complete slavery. Slavery of the mind. When they found a way to lift that bondage . . . genocide had not been enough. They had needed to destroy every trace of those who had enslaved them. “A thousand million deaths must be an understatement.”
“Oh, yes.” She sipped. “You understand now why I say dragons agree about stopping her. The one you call the Great Bitch wishes to subjugate entire races. Dragons have long memories,” she said as she had before. “They do not forget. They do not forgive. They hate her with a depth you cannot conceive.”
Rule looked at the teacup in his hand. He drank it quickly to get rid of it, then he set the cup down. “I see why you insisted that Reno could be trusted not to act in a way that helped her.”
Grandmother nodded. “And now we come to the other secret.”
His eyebrows lifted. “We do?”
“Have you never wondered why many dragons chose Earth, out of all the realms, to settle?”
“Many times,” he said dryly. “They do not encourage questions. I’ve also wondered if they—our dragons—were all the dragons there are.”
“No. Dragons are not numerous, but their numbers are not so thin as that. Many live in the sidhe realms, but Earth held an appeal those realms did not.” Her sigh was faint. “It is not so much that dragons want to go home as that they want home to be possible.”
“The fall-throughs here,” he started—then stopped and thought it through. People had fallen into this realm from Earth often enough to populate it. Demons had fallen through from Dis sometimes. A few had fallen here from other realms, too, but not many. “Have there been any fall-throughs the other way around? People—or beasts—falling into China or Dis from here?”
She shook her head. “This is unlikely. One does not fall up, only down. It is a matter of entropy. Magic is disorderly, so greater magic means greater disorder. Beings fall from a low-magic realm to one with greater magic and so greater disorder.”
“I thought Dis was fairly high-magic.”
“It has more magic than Earth, but it is not a true high-magic realm. Dragonhome is. We are traveling through what is probably the lowest-magic region in this world, and there is more magic here than anywhere on Earth and most parts of Dis. Humans cannot live in most parts of Dragonhome. Some places here even the sidhe could not survive for long.”
He considered that, decided it didn’t take him anywhere useful, and brought the conversation back to what she’d said earlier. Or had she just implied it? “The dragons—some of them anyway—came to Earth to be closer to their home realm?”
“In part. Theory made them think Earth had nodes in common with Dragonhome. Also, they were curious about humans. Curiosity is a driving force with dragons. It wars at times with their territorial instinct; they do not love travel. But a chance to learn about their ancient home was very interesting to them. A chance to find their lost kin was, for some, compelling.
“The chance seemed slight. They knew little of their original realm, you understand. Certainly not how to find it. They found a few hints, but these were tenuous. Many dragons concluded that either the realm itself or access to it had been destroyed by the owners long ago, possibly in one of their ritualistic wars among themselves. They were a quarrelsome people,” she added. “But dragons did not forget their distant kin. They did not forget that there was, or once had been, a world where all dragons were mind-blind. They did not,” she concluded dryly, “agree about what to do, but some wanted to find those kin, or at least determine that such a finding was impossible.”
Curiosity stirred. “How did they manage to get to Earth when they can’t build gates?”
“Who do you think taught the gnomes how to build gates?”
“Ah . . . I see. I suppose they wouldn’t have passed on that knowledge for free?”
Her response was a soft snort.
“Is that how we got our gate into Dis? Because of some ages-old deal between gnomes and dragons?”
“All gnomes everywhere must build a gate or see that one is built if two or more dragons require it of them.”
He considered that. “And yet they needed Lily, and the gate she carried at the time, to leave Dis.”
“There are no gnomes in Dis. You are running after shiny things, leaving the real subject behind. Stop this. Several dragons came to Earth not long—I speak in dragon terms—before the Great War. Yes,” she said, no doubt reading his expression, “you see that this changed matters.”
The Great War she referred to was not World War One, but a cataclysm that had engulfed pretty much every realm in existence over three thousand years ago. At its heart, it had been a battle of ideas . . . opposing ideas held by two camps of Old Ones. One side fought for self-determination for the younger races. Sovereignty, in other words. The other side fought for the right to help the younger races develop into the best they could be—with those Old Ones determining what each race’s “best” ought to look like. That side had made themselves into gods in order to better help—or interfere with, or dictate to—the younger races. That side had been mad.
It had been largely a proxy war, with the two camps of Old Ones battling through intermediaries. Largely, but not entirely. In some realms, Rule had been taught, Old Ones had fought in person. Those realms didn’t exist anymore.
The Great War was the reason the Great Bitch couldn’t simply enter Earth and take over. Her side had lost, and the winning Old Ones had fixed things so no Old One could enter any realm. But the realms were not equally protected. The Great Bitch could have an avatar in Dis—and currently did—but if the woman now serving as her avatar entered Earth, most of her power did not enter with her. Rule didn’t understand that. It had to do with the amount of her that could enter Earth. Apparently that was quite small, thank all the gods.
The Great War was also the reason Rule existed. His people had been created to oppose her. “A lot changed with the Great War.”
“A lot of dragons died,” she said grimly. “Proportionately more than any other surviving species, if one does not count the constructs.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Do you consider lupi a construct?”
“Do not be touchy. I referred to the chimea, dworg, and ti’tel.”
“I’ve never heard of the ti’tel.”